1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computer software programs and databases to be used in Financial Service Organizations. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for configuring a Financial Service Organization (FSO) production system for gathering business data including transactional data, sorting the data, and collating the data into reports for the entities of the FSO.
2. Description of the Related Art
FSOs such as banks, credit unions, etc., use computer systems running software programs to process FSO transactions. The FSO systems may include one or more databases for storing data. The databases may include groups of data such as the master files of customer account information, transaction data such as customer credit card purchase transactions, processing data such as the processing parameters used in processing transactions, and history data such as log files of daily activities for batch processing.
FSO systems often utilize hardcoded software to process FSO transactions. Changes in the business environment often result in corresponding changes to the processing relationship among various entities of a Financial Service Organization (FSO). For example, new banks being acquired or new branch locations being opened often add to the processing structure of an FSO. FSO systems, which utilize hardcoded software, become more difficult to adapt to the changing processing structure. For example, it may be difficult to change the format of a hardcoded FSO report that has to be collated by regions, wherein one of the regions has expanded to cover more branch FSOs.
The following is hereby incorporated by reference: Object Oriented mail server framework mechanism (U.S. Pat No. 6,081,832), Object Oriented framework mechanism for order processing including predefined extensible classes for defining an order processing environment (U.S. Pat. No. 6,049,665), Object Oriented framework mechanism for determining configuration relations (U.S. Pat. No. 5,937,189), Object Oriented mail server framework mechanism (U.S. Pat. No. 5,768,505), Decentralized distributed asynchronous object oriented system and method for electronic data management, storage, and communication (U.S. Pat. No. 5,550,976) and Document display system for organizing and displaying documents as screen objects organized along strand paths (U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,330).